Long Trail Field Notes #1

Of Tranquility, And Commotion

Trudging through mud today, I dug the fluted stylings of seven thrushes. I thought: Isn't it all just movement and stillness, anyway? As with the forest, so with the city. And the heart. Strange metallic attenuations, rising out of a bird's throat and drifting on air. Thinking all this, my wits half-focused on wet moss and patches of sunlight, I found I had stumbled up on Consultation Peak. Isn't it all just stillness and movement? The quiet. And the thrum.

The Long Trail of Vermont

Friends and Family,

I'm headed out on a little walking adventure for a bit.

My itinerary is to hike The Long Trail of Vermont. Built by the Green Mountain Club from 1910 to 1930, it's the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States. It's a precursor to the Appalachian Trail and it actually coincides with the Appalachian for about 100 miles. The Long Trail goes from the Vermont-Massachusetts border to the Vermont Canada border, over 272 green mountain miles. It begins near Williamstown, Massachusetts and ends near North Troy, Vermont.

I have my tent, sleeping bag, and plenty of beef jerky with me.

I will walk northward, hoping to cover roughly 15 to 20 miles per day, and finish the route in about two weeks (maybe a little more). My pack weighs 33 pounds with all my gear, water, and six days of food. I'll resupply at a trailside town or two along the way. For perspective, when I Through-Hiked the Appalachian Trail, my pack generally weighed more than twice what it does now...that was 18 years ago! I'm happy that technology has made big strides with ultralight backpacking gear.

I'm taking my current poetry manuscript with me to work on solidifying the final order of poems in the book. That will be my intellectual project for the trip, occupying my noggin as I stumble over muddy rocks and gnarly roots. I'll also be sending lots of love and happy energy to you all as I go. If, in these next couple of weeks, you happen to glance up at a mountain or stream, or take a favorite forested stroll, mentally send me some good vibrations...as I'll be sending them to you! I'll be traveling solo but keeping you all right next to my heart.

Shortly I'll step off the bus from New York City...I'm about to arrive in Williamstown, Massachusetts...it's a quick walk to the trail from there...the woods and mountains beckon...

Andiamo!

Dal mio cuore matto,

Matteo

Come Join Surrealist Writing With Matt Rotando!

Come join me in Tucson!

for

A Surrealist Writing Workshop

At the University of Arizona Poetry Center from May 20 to May 26

This is a week-long intensive Surrealist writing workshop. We will not write “poetry” exclusively, because to limit the medium would only negate the expansive attitude the early Surrealists worked so hard to encourage. In his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), André Breton wrote that the imagination knows no bounds, but that we are nearly always engaged in actions that limit it. This class works to reverse the process, to “unfurl the flag of the imagination” and produce the strangest and maddest pieces of art and writing, in order “to express, either verbally, or in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.” We will read and discuss key texts such as the major manifestos of the early Surrealists, and early iconic poetic and dramatic formations by writers such as Breton, Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Péret, Robert Desnos, Henri Michaux, and others. We will also make contact with newer works by more contemporary surrealist artists and writers. However, all of our looking into Surrealism’s past and present unfolding will be to illumine and inspire us to create our own imaginative works. This workshop will actively explore both individual and collaborative writing and art. Even the “critiques” that we perform will be creative and entertaining.

Exercises will include, but not be limited to: collaborative poetry and drawing, written interactions with visual art, reading, writing and performance of short dramatic scenes, extensive automatic writing projects, postcards to nowhere, and building dream sculptures. The workshop is open to writers and artists of every type and skill level. If you are blocked or stuck in a particular mode of expression, or feel the need to kick-start your art in an open and imaginative space, this class is for you.

In addition to the 2 ½ hours that our class meets each night, Matt will hold office hours several times during the week as a supplement to the workshop. These will be optional and anyone from the class is welcome but not obligated to attend. Also, the class will culminate in a short performance or recital of some of the works we create during the week-long intensive workshop. This is also fully optional.

Tuition: $225 + $5 course material fee

Class meets:
Monday through Saturday, May 20–25, 6:00–8:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 26, 7:00–8:30 p.m.

More information and registration can be found here.

Regarding Pain

Sometimes the thing I try to do is feel all my pain at exactly the same time. The pain in my legs from running too hard, the pain in my chest from my lonely pleasure, the pain in my back from my bicycle crash, the pain in my temple because I don't see my grandma enough, the pain in my left knee from when I carried Butch on my shoulders and stepped into a ditch, the pain in my cheeks and stomach from one recent and particularly premature goodbye, the pain in my eyes from the time I saw what I shouldn't have seen (a death too young). I think of all this and I try to bring all this physical pain right up to the surface, all at the same time: the itch, the heat, the dull knot, the ache, the pressure, the stab...I let them all take me over, fill me up, so there isn't any idea of me left that isn't pain pain haha pain haha. 

And then he just spins there, a pain man, a hot popcorn kernel whizzing around in a kettle about to pop...but he doesn't pop...he just spins and spins, getting hotter and hotter and the walls of his skin begin to turn black and smoke...and still he gets hotter and a little orange flame forms and dances across his surface and his face cracks and falls away and his eyes light up, sending Fourth of July sparks everywhere and the full moon begins to wobble in its orbit around the earth from the incredible nuclear heat of this man made of pain spinning faster than a quark, faster than Einstein ever dreamed. A new and very unstable source of gravity forms and drags all sorts of unknown elements out of the center of the earth's molten core and they blast upwards towards the moon, which has begun to rumble and tremble. And weird milky stuff the color of Brie oozes out of the cracks in the moon's surface. And all the people of planet Earth are out of their beds now (half of them were awake already anyway) and they look up into the sky or down at the fissures forming in the rupturing earth and they begin to feel all their pain too, because of a strange chemical associative effect from the scorching speed and intensity of the man made of pain going round and round haha haha. 

And before anybody knows what to do or how to do it the whole shitshow makes a sound like the puff of air from the device the eye doctor uses to shoot in your pupil during your eye exam and it all disappears. And then...Nothing. Just a faint smell of unpopped popcorn and a vast and endless space. And Werner Herzog in a space capsule with a hand-held camera over his shoulder pointing into the blackness saying to himself: "Yesss. Yesss. Haha. Yesss. I knew it. Thiss wass the right time."

Wavy Kat Tink-A-Tink

The Beast That Lunges/ La Bestia Que Abalanza

(I'm deeply grateful to my good friend Dr. Marlowe Daly-Galeano for her editorial assistance and guidance with the Spanish version of this poem.)

The Beast That Lunges

The best thing about remembering is that it’s in your hands. You revolt against sleep and become a phantom in time, moving through rooms and visions as a wiry, feral child. You don’t need words to eat, to find shelter. You taste water in air and move to it with your thirst. You kneel over a lake at night. The outline of your face is a surprise. You breathe hard and lunge into recollection. You run backwards and laugh at your heelprints in the earth. Snakes slide back to their skins. Fires grow into trees. Pearls soften to sand. You unwrite the future for the happy beast you are becoming. Rain whispers quietly upward. The past begins to show. Clarity is dimness. Your hands as clouds, as fins, as roaming notes.

***

La Bestia Que Abalanza

Lo mejor de la memoria es que está en tus manos. Te rebelas contra el sueño y te conviertes en fantasma del tiempo, moviéndote a través de piezas y visiones como un niño enjuto, salvaje. No necesitas palabras para comer, para encontrar refugio. Saboreas el agua en el aire y acercándolo con tu sed. Te arrodillas sobre un lago en la noche. El contorno de tu rostro es una sorpresa. Respiras duro y arremetes contra el recuerdo. Corres hacia atrás y te ríes de las impresiones de tu talón en la tierra. Las serpientes vuelvan a sus pieles. Los incendios crecen en los árboles. Las perlas se ablandan a la arena. Desescribes el futuro de la bestia felíz que serás. La lluvia susurra en voz baja hacia arriba. El pasado comienza a mostrar. La claridad es penumbra. Tus manos como nubes, como aletas, como las notas que vagan.

Your Newness

On Memory

I have just woken from a dream in which I ran into my dear friend, S., after many years. In the heat of the afternoon, at the same moment, we each turned a dusty corner on a quiet street of our old town, which I happened to be visiting. To my pleasure and surprise, there was S., thin and loping, and wishing me a good day. I embraced him of a sudden, and he took several confused steps backward. He did not remember me. I could hardly believe it. We had not seen each other for some years, but we had shared so much. We once walked and laughed together, many miles, in the blistering desert. We had browsed the cramped markets together in the Valley of the Brave. We used to spend hours in silent meditation, sitting alongside each other and breathing. I tried to remind him of his love for huitlacoche and for the chocolate sapote, and for the wings of men. He shook his head in silence. I recalled how we once appeared to each other in the hills, summoning one another with our thoughts. Bewildered, S. remembered nothing. I recounted in detail how we laughed at the wind when it dislodged and flung poorly attached shingles from the roof of the little mountain house we once lived in. I told him of how he comforted me after I had to leave a woman I loved, who had been his friend. He stared into the distance. I told him of one of his own lovers laughing and throwing her head back and tossing firecrackers from windows of moving cars. I told him of how he taught me to be patient, very patient, when sautéing mushrooms, and to use more butter than I thought appropriate. None of it came back to his mind. He could not even recall my face. I began to wonder if I had invented him. He certainly looked like the S. I thought I knew, but since he neither remembered me, nor our experiences together, was it not feasible that I had created him, that I had made his likeness a character for my own use? Was it possible that I had never been to The Brave Valley, had never savored the huitlacoche, and, indeed, had only dreamed myself into such scenes, using the template of S.'s face as a companion in my imagining? Perhaps I was a mirrored reflection of the forgetfulness of S. Perhaps my memories, which I had cherished so hotly, were pure invention, immaterial as wishes. I tore at my chest with my hands, and trudged from the street where we met. I looked back only once and saw him, perplexed, holding my black wings in his arms. They had fallen into the dust when I turned away. That was the last moment in which I could recall him.

On Art, Part III

(This is Part III of a four part mini-think piece on art. Every section qualifies and contradicts every other section. Okay?)

God, to me, is only the vast expanse of neural fire and silence that gives rise to the imagination. Hence, in a metaphysical sense, there is no death. But we use the word as a stand-in for an infinite depth of unknowing. And I suspect there is a way to touch that sea of storms and quiet in this lifetime...and I suspect it is through the heart door...because sometimes when I'm making art the world of distraction slips away and it's as if I'm barely there, my words are uttering themselves, and all I really need to do is get out of their way.

Thus, regarding art and everything else, there are two modes: pressing forward, or giving up. The former allows for an upsurge of inspiration, of questions, emotions and thoughts in the artist and the audience. The latter is a dusty secluded room where people go to be bored by an assembly line life...moving around as mere meat, shrouding the burnt-out remnants of consciousness. And if we decide to embrace the former, which we should do, definitely, then life becomes this risky and deafening cascade of glorious and terrible interactions. Even when we're by ourselves, alone in a room with our thoughts...and especially then, because to feel the weight of those thoughts as things we make and then let go of forever is to feel the weight of time and oblivion, which we all must face. Now and at the hour of the body's demise. 

Art is the process and the practice of knowing that every moment matters. This doesn't have to be a fearful knowing...but it makes some people desperate with denial if all they've been doing is pushing their meat-suits around, grumbling about how much highway tolls cost. But seriously, that is the silliest thing...you have someplace to go, the road you're on takes you there...just go. Enjoy the scenery and the music and the sound of the engine and the wind in your face. And when you come to the toll booth, pay the price, say "thanks" and make sure you touch the toll collector's hand (at least acknowledge the minimum of human contact). And then go forward. I'm not talking about tolls, of course. I'm talking about obstacles...every one of which is both a pitfall and a chance. But the idea is to pay the toll and use courage and momentum to look forward into the wind. Keep one hand on the wheel and one hand on your lover's thigh, and turn in the direction of brightness, strangeness, and adventure. Then art is not just something beautiful that you make to leave for the world so that it remembers you (it either will or it won't). Art is also a tool and a talisman that you use to see ahead of you into the night. It's something you use to look into that vast neural fire and emptiness. Because you have to look and you have to go forward into it, despite all fears, to avoid the insipid meat-suit shuffle. 

The rooms with those selves of ours that are just acting life out, rather than living it...those rooms are always looming and lurking right behind us. And jutting our necks out into the uncertainty and strangeness is what causes us to embrace the death game, saying, "Yes, death, I know you're here...but look, I'm here too, and I made something that even you have to contend with, before you pull the sheet over me." And though we may shake, art is the love that propels us forward into the glimmering dark...and it's also the message we bring back to this humming world.

The Captain

This

There is not this this unless we go without this, only we do this, and this doesn’t do it for us when we do it. Then they do it and we do it and the winding down of doing it winds us up and we do it, this thing, this doing, which makes us do it. This. Then they go through it and we go through it and that is what does it, even though instead of that we call it this, which never helps that. Unless…well… maybe it helps that, but not this. The only thing that helps this is this thing that we do when we stop doing that other thing, which is the thing we always do anyway. So there’s no stopping us from doing what it is we do when we’re doing it without trying to do it. It’s almost unavoidable, doing this thing, which is something we have to contend with, especially when it’s always on the table, this thing we almost always do. Then we do this other thing, to try and stop doing the thing we always do, but that just leads us to doing the thing we always do again and again, anyway. So then, whether we’re trying or not trying, we’re doing this and that, again and again, until we stop. But even when we stop, there’s no rest from doing the other thing.

On Art, Part II

(This is Part II of a four part mini-think piece on art. Every section qualifies and contradicts every other section. Okay?)

Works of art from all times live in us and change us. No matter when they were produced, or how long ago their makers may have passed on, the ability that we as an audience have to interact with pieces of art brings them to life. In the fields of both thought and emotion, works of art are reanimated, and take on new hues, new resonances, in every age. Because we can interact with a piece of art, even one that was made in the deep past, the contextual field which produced it comes to the forefront of our consciousness. The work also has the capacity to change our ways of thinking that were beyond where we could go had we not encountered this form from a bygone era. This brings the work to life in such a way as to surely fulfill the hopes and intentions of nearly any creator, any poet, any sculptor, alive or long dead. 

The hope and vision of many artists is that their art will stand the test of time and eventually change the course of history and culture. For this is the "life" of a work of art: to move through time and inspire people to think, to feel, to improve themselves, and to spur other artists to create. A piece of art can be said to be alive in that moment when either its creator or its audience is changed by it. Any time a person interacts, emotionally and thoughtfully, with a piece of art, it can be said to have "action," which, for a constructed thing, is vibrancy and life. Such moments happen with works of art from all eras, even when we do not understand much, intellectually, about works whose creation moments are so distant that they have become alien to us. Often their very strangeness is the primal force that spurs us to wonder with even greater fervor.

On Art, Part I

(This is Part I of a four part mini-think piece on art. Every section qualifies and contradicts every other section. Okay?)

Art, especially good art, only exists during the act of making. As soon as a piece has been "rendered," it is a corpse, despite any giant swell of thoughts or feelings its maker or its audience may have towards it. Art is only the relationship between the act of making and the action of what's being made. This relationship is an exceedingly fleeting thing. In the act of art-making, the artist must contend with not only all of his own thoughts, feelings, lived experience and technique, but also with the press of the world upon the moment. Whatever is built in such an instance cannot be carried past the moment of its issuance and thought of in the same way. In fact, unless it is being born to die in the instant it is made it cannot be called art. 

Our museums, our galleries, our libraries, are all graves and graveyards. Nothing more. We are, with all of our sincerity and all of our fascination, merely tomb fetishists. This is not to say that there is no merit in commemorating and adoring dead husks, the traces of what was once art. In fact it's a wonderful, inspirational thing to do. Inspirational and pathetic. I mean neither of these adjectives pejoratively. Pathos is worthy in that it can draw both passion and empathy out of the heart. One might say, "This line by Dickinson, this movement by Brahms...they have carried me, they have sustained me, they have moved me toward better versions of myself." This is all very fine. But such a person, moved though he may be, has only been contending with his own associations, prompted by contact with something that is already dead. Therefore let us call corpses and their graves by their true names. Let us also note that many figures who call themselves artists and art lovers are merely carrion birds. Eaters of dead flesh. A lot of worldly gains can be made eating and regurgitating rotten meat. But such practices are neither the true pleasure nor the worthy provenance of the artist. 

Even an exceedingly well-made thing is a dead thing. The person who recognizes the inherent futility in any attempt to resurrect the dead can begin to taste what it means to be an artist. Art, in all forms, only exists as such in the space between its birth and its death. No artist can be "finished" with any piece and think he continues to be an artist. An artist is only an artist in the moment of making; art is only art during the moment of being made.

Rags

Wearing rags
And wandering alone in the desert
I saw one tree on the horizon
I spent weeks or maybe months trying to walk to it
One night without knowing how I stumbled upon it
I curled and went to sleep under its branches
In the morning my dream had scorched it to the ground
Now there is no direction
Only rags remain

Fear Of Sleep

How does a thing come of anything? What want I try? I slip that template. What rabbit? All these yes to the busted yes. All these wish to get frowned on and records in my hair. These red phrases. These collected hues and tin pipes plunk me down at a family door. In the mirror I switch to my old face. I switch back. The story is only beginning, but I still fear sleep. Poor ruin for fate, for the charm of making, for trains. Canals and laugh tracks, jukebox betrothed, do the end sway.

Overseasoned

We are not supposed to salt our underwear.
Everyone knows this.
But still…

On My Burial Mound

Yes. To go down and not find relics is hardly a future. For me. For you. What is this refraction? What is this change? What heart in me spools outward now? How is it the you I write to is both you and me? I am trying not to build emotion, I am trying to hoist story to the level of poem and smash it through a sweet reflector. As for my hands, they find things to do with you. Buoyant, they feel strong when I grin and strong when I fall. This upward gust is not a thief of seclusion, but close. Imagine. Some nothing dashes through you and you fear no memory. Instead you sit. You sit in the memory of nothing and you bellow ever stronger. It’s the fate of every search, every forking light. You distant shimmer, you weed, you you. Something is home when you say it is. Words make things home, not this scattered mass of hoods and quiet. Nowhere has me; I stand atop my burial mound. I look down and in. I will take you to my ancestors, to my tectonic beginnings, to me before I knew codes.

A Visit From My Familiar

Tricks depend on trick thinking, on dash to sea, and cry of dogs at night. One is for writing, two is for filling wants. Light cracks through cracks in the curtains. My hand rises off this bed of its own accord, and floats above your face while you sleep. It sends warmth from my palm into your cheek. I hear sentences in my head and make movements towards you, my legs planted. I am the tree that waits for you to climb. There is thirst enough between us to dry a town. I see you at your desk, writing and wanting. Sometimes you cry in your longing and I send my ghost brain to your fingers and eyes, that they might be touched. Lamps above you flicker and curtains shift. You breathe hard as my face and arms appear. My hands move over you in slow and heavy sweeps. You feel them as you write, your desk an urgent shelf of stories. Your sentences well and burst. My beard on the back of your neck makes you shiver and smile.

Beyond Stuttered Imaginings

Me Seed

Me black seed. Me beget falcon. Me hawk. Me deeds estuary cemetery. Me death too, far floor. Me draw. Me blood sea paint. Me weeds. Me jelly arm bright lip. Me possible. Me miss. Me clock. Me go on, go on, go over. Me away. Me airplane. Oak leaves me boil tongue. Smoke list, me. Silver choke, hand me. Quite silent me. Me nail sleep back burn. Me sweat, legs head. Me try. Me empty, open, star mouth. Me snow. Me antecedent. Me Wednesday. Me even. Me rough press. Me room. Me kneel. Me ship tooth. Me tog. Me away. Away.

Hot Stone

Take me to dark. Take me to jade murk and high fever cliffs. Take me beyond turning bodies. I have a book of arms unfolding for you, each leaf a riot grip for your neck, your breasts. My sleep is now wraith tournament of strangling white fabric and parched black fingers. Early mornings are short relief from torment, from struggle against sunken carvings of our worn and distant faces. When day begins I drop on world, spiders on hot stone.

Tiny Moons

Zen and the Art of Walking: Ruminations of an Appalachian Thru Hiker

(This article was originally published in Volume 4, Issue 2 of Blue Adventure Magazine, now out-of-print, but you can find a cool original version of the article on pages 29-32 at this link.)

Long walks clear the head.

Each year, strange pilgrims from all over the world leave their homes, jobs, comforts and families in an attempt to hike huge stretches or participate in “thru-hikes” (end-to-end treks) of the longest trails on earth. One such footpath, the Appalachian National Scenic Trail (AT), extends a gargantuan 2,168 miles from Maine to Georgia. A thru-hike of the AT is one of the longest walks in the United States. People who stride over this or other long trails put up with six months of rain, blisters, bugbites (LOTS of bugbites) and plenty of muscle, joint and stomach troubles.

Like modern ascetics, some thru-hikers walk purely for the challenge or to combat rampant media addictions, choosing a life of quiet forest trekking over near-essentials like telephones, email and TV. Some are seasoned hikers, already used to the all-day weight of a pack on their shoulders, out to experience an extended connection to nature. Living out in the woods for several months creates an intimate bond with the most natural colors, sounds and scents of our living planet. Others take these long treks to figure something out about themselves. Or to try and stop figuring things out and simply walk. Either way, they are the seekers, the vision hunters, the believers in the notion that just walking, just being in nature, will get them somewhere further than point B.

I hiked the Appalachian Trail to change my life. I began my walk at Mount Katahdin, Maine, in May and I completed it, six months later, at Springer Mountain, Georgia, in November. I left behind a string of unsatisfying jobs, a crumbling love relationship and a host of troubling family issues. I wanted to carve months of calm reflection and heavy soul-searching into the rocks and roots with my own bootsoles. I was walking to clear my head.

During my time in the woods, I met people who had been hiking long trails for decades and had tapped into some inner world that made their faces glow, bright as campfires, even after many seasons of mud and rain. I befriended newlyweds who had decided to take the toughest and most beautiful honeymoon they could think of. I met recent retirees who were finally realizing a lifelong dream and college students taking time off to figure out what their purpose in life was. I also ran into some long-bearded freaks, who I simply could not imagine living anywhere but the woods. And they were as vibrant and authentic as anyone else out there.

That authenticity is available to everyone who walks. Away from the roles that conventional life asks us to play, hiking the AT allows you to spend five or six months being exactly who you want. And hopefully you’ll take as much of that person back to the paved life as you can. You can be the silent brooder who speaks few words and walks 20 to 30 miles every day. You can be the kid who everyone is happy to see because you play a great campfire harmonica or always have a surplus bag of M&M’s you’re willing to share. You can be the guy who writes sonnets in all the shelter journals. You can even be the woman who yogis (scams food from weekend hikers) better than anyone. And when you start hiking, you can give yourself a “trail name,” a new name that embodies all the things you are or wish to be or one that simply pokes fun at yourself and the universe.

Trail names help individual forest dwellers feel more connected to each other. For some, a trail name is just a fun conversation starter, (“How did you get the name ‘Wombutt’?”). For others, trail names contribute to a feeling of transformation, a sense of having entered upon a new and different kind of life, a life shared only by other hikers. The act of choosing your own name, one that’s much different from the one you were given at birth, can help you to be more introspective and to remember that destiny is self-determined. Some of my pals, months after finishing their walks, still sign letters with their trail names.

As I recall the thru-hikers I trudged with, I associate favorite memories, traits and experiences with hosts of unusual trail names. I remember pounding through the cold of the Great Smoky Mountains with a Georgia hiker named “Chunker”; discussing Krishnamurti and meditation with a former US Army Ranger named “I Don’t Know”; sweating through the swamps of the middle states with “Lost Sheep,” a muscle-bound North Carolinian (named for his favorite Dukes of Hazzard character); eating tuna fish with Lost Sheep’s pal, “Tunatarian” (he’s Unitarian and loves Chicken of the Sea); and soaking my feet in a cold Maine stream with my college pal and hiking compañero, a stentorian-voiced, red-bearded poet, trail-named “Booch.”

My own trail name? I’ll come to that. First let me tell you about my hardest (and best) hiking day ever.

It was a frigid November day in the snow-covered hills of North Carolina. I hadn’t slept well (read: warm) in a week and a half, since my really good sleeping bag was waiting for me at the Hot Springs NC, post office. Hot Springs was 21 miles from where I had slept the night before so I had to pull a long day through the white stuff to get there. Booch was a day ahead of me, presumably already eating warm diner meals and strumming his backpacker guitar in the Hot Springs hiker hostel.

When I started out from the shelter at 8am, the temperature was hovering around 30?F and six to twelve inches of snow covered the trail. Following the familiar white blazes that mark the AT, the pine trees were bent over with the weight of the snow creating a sort of tunnel out of the trail. I very quickly got into “the zone,” that state of mind where time and fatigue are barely perceptible, one foot in front of the other becoming a physical mantra that deletes all thoughts. For the first few hours, I hardly felt affected by the ups and downs of the landscape. I had lost 30 pounds since I started the trail more than five months before, some of it spare tire weight, some of it upper body muscle. I was basically nothing but legs, pack and beard. I zoomed up steep and slippery inclines, gorgeous mountain vistas rolling out on every side.

At noon I tried to stop for lunch but realized that if I halted for more than 10 minutes, my body temperature would drop too low for me to sit and enjoy eating. So I stuffed my many pockets with PowerBars, Snickers, tortillas, brownies and Little Debbie snack cakes and kept walking. When I got hungry, I would slow my pace to a meandering shuffle and eat and drink while I walked. This technique was great for covering big miles in the cold and giving my body a bit of rest at the same time. By 2pm I had finished all my water, but I didn’t stop to filter more. When I got thirsty, I simply packed a tortilla full of snow and ate a chilly burrito.

All was going smoothly, and I anticipated arriving in Hot Springs at about 5pm, just in time to catch a shower and meet up with Booch for a big fried chicken dinner. But at around 4pm, as I was beginning the longest and last ascent of the day, my thoughts went into hyperneurotic overdrive. This is an experience well known to many hikers. I think it arises due to the meditative depth that a hiker reaches on really long days. Your mind seems to become so aware of itself as a thinking mechanism that it starts kicking out wild worries and doubt-riddled thoughts about the future, creating a state of how-can-I-go-on-ness. You suddenly become supremely aware of the lactic acid burn in your legs and back and every step becomes a supreme effort of the will.

I was slogging up a cold hill, my body suddenly hurting, my mind hollering at me about jobs, money, relationships and family crises. I couldn’t believe how quickly I had gone from mountain man to mental mouse. My preoccupations had hunted me down and I was aching to be anywhere but in my own head.

This went on for 30 excruciating minutes. I cannot really say what kept me going, other than force of habit. But when I got to the final few steps of the incline, I saw a huge stand of trees stretching out over the ridge I was following. All their branches were covered with layers of ice that made them look like gemstone figurines, planted in some fantastic, through-the-looking-glass landscape. What’s more, they were pierced all throughout with the bright orange light of the setting sun which bounced off the entire snowy forest floor. I stopped, frozen by the beauty all around me. And then I lost it…

I started chuckling to myself about all the ridiculous psychodramas I had been playing out over the last half-hour. Then I started laughing out loud. Then I began bellowing at the top of my lungs. I actually fell down into the snow in peals of laughter. I heard myself sing out, “The job, the girl, the future, it’s all gonna be all right. You don’t have to worry about a thing. Just be.”

Had I gone crazy? No way. I was sane for the first time in a long while. I had hiked the future and the past right out of me. I was sitting stock still in the middle of the present. After five months of walking, I had been hit with the diamond bullet of pure, energy-filled peace. My head was changed for the way better. My whole thru-hike was worth that one moment.

The remaining miles glided by effortlessly. When I got to the friendly town of Hot Springs, I greeted all the villagers with a mysterious grin. After a great shower I pulled out my journal and penned this haiku-like poem:

High on the last hill, the wind blew everything away,
even my real name—
now I walk unburdened.

I found something that afternoon. It took almost half a year of hiking to tap into, but nothing’s been the same since. My trail name, by the way, is Change.

Problem Of Translation

From my thoughts grow a thousand thoughts. As if each idea has a dozen unruly children sproinging from its face & armpits. I could make a list for you of kinds of thought I’ve witnessed just this week. An utterly inadequate list, each one swinging doors wide on so many new shadows: dog ribs; the ticklish sting of big snowflakes falling on my cheek; dogs smiling as they run; tiny children’s pre-language thoughts; the quietest place in Spain; the erections of Vladimir Putin & the Dalai Lama; umbrellas torn by strong wind; what Janis Joplin sounded like when she came; plaid; whether or not the Golden Fleece was real; the smell of anise seeds; the weight of love...the actual weight of it, when I feel it & feel heavy, in those moments, if I had the right scale, could I measure that fluctuation in mass or weight?; the iron heat at the core of the earth & its fluid movement; the loneliness of the last stop on a train to deep Siberia; the moment you were born & your first breath & scream & the haze of faces & lights you saw when you opened your eyes; how I walk around with your name tattooed on my throat, & how strange it is not to see it there when I shuck my clothes; a camera following me from space, observing my most random movements, recording everything; the color & shape of your nipples & the taste of your spit; the flexible bones of a snake, all spine; the baby teeth of cave children; the liquid qualities of glass; the idea that my blood is using me to get to you.

Rise Up And Be Lonely

Temple Temple, Walls And Doors

I am dank angel, ready wine, the anti-cure. An instance of guitar dropped on the desert. I am a rare crease in time. These hands, my fleeting fists, this continent. I have walked to the edge. This rusting freedom. Near the black door I hang my head, my father’s gun against the wall. These nails, this pre-grace, this balkanized love. I feel only wind, and my rag chestbone. My gaze and my jar brim with eyes and fingers. My apples, my boy fears, my sliding face and mouth, my quiet. I have no patience, no measure. I cannot open a tiny window. Witch of wet stories, you are my June muse. This island, my torn and dripping jaw. You are the western sun and the hot mouth of dreams. Neither can I hear you, nor slow. You are rough water, silent and plunging. I would watch you run, and hold you. When you stretch into an ancient, haunted creature, with crooked eyes and stringy hair, I will still press my ear to your mouth. I want to love you forty thousand years, 'til you are only beetle shells and sand.

Like Bugs Off Pond Water

Going Red In The Head

Wind last night and I saw birds today. This, my head, sees red and goes efficiently to corners. It all seems the best. So true it’s the best. Now might be the time for me to try and understand a boat as more than a pleasure craft. How many boat voyages did old Ben Franklin take? I could read his journals, one by one, get a grant to witness everything in his own writing and then come up with a number. Maybe a number like 114, or 78. Maybe those are way, way off. Maybe Ben Franklin took hundreds and hundreds of boat voyages, on lakes, seas, and rivers. Weren’t there a lot of ferries in his day? Well, my conscience and I both know I’m not going to bother. I don’t even know why I thought about Ben Franklin as a water traveler. I could have thought of August Wilson or Boëthius. They’re from different times, but I’ll bet they both made water voyages.

Walking West

In The Abyss

Loss, Magic

Hands

Lost Cities

This despicable knot, unctuous man, unkind to doors. I have him in my eye, as a sir, and as a daring fly. He remembers not. I am the one who remembers, alone in his dead house. His roots slip out and dissolve. He topples and lands, again and again, as the ghost of a different metropole. Pompeii, Mohenjo-daro, Tikal. 

The Oblong Tally (Three Questions)

What if there was a way to tear everything everywhere in half? I can see superlatives shorn, and even the blue Pacific. The signs show and thighs are simple essays to smith on chocks of stone. I tap my fist in sundry dreams and land rolls away. All the shadows we go for, we use to rupture ourselves. I turn out to be monolithic man, born for the beginning. This is the fresh relegation of words you shack with, the many people we show our underclothes. To find rhythm is to gain evidence against slaughter and to prevent slaughter. I can see us cheer in the black dark, the box we grew into. That was not a way to end anything. I listen to the wall crack against my hand while I enact the force of waiting. Elsewheres are the habits we catalog when we touch what we don’t want. It’s only a problem when we do things. I feel the crud of all these we’s and you’s in the short term. Can I abandon the whorl of ago? What if time was just a way to chill? The cold people are in me and they dance when I see shards of ice falling off the trees.

What Of Action, Of December

It’s warm and our lights are out. The torch song unspools in the back. I sit and write to your grave center. There’s no mysterious thing. The particles that connected you came and went. We use heavy and heavier words and no map. Only falling avails us. This is some beginning, a frag of freak dream. All things in line, stable, like some pitch you made when we existed. I’m out of coffee and my veins don’t throb. I’m just sweet, checking the grey plastic in all the aisles of our dumb civilization. In every shack a computer, belittled lamb of sod. I write this thing damned near every day. Voices and music overlay. By whatever is useless, we tug the snow down. Trouble is for beauty and the dead.

Real Séance

Even though we’re not feeling it we try. Putting our hands up and through, we see a large man fold his finger in a quick way. They, we say, they. It is always like this, at the beginning, wearing fake beards and faces painted up with green bird signs. Yes, indicate understanding. Stand aside and see what little growing things vibrate in oases of the dead. Let’s end calling them graves. Everyone has ideas easily enough, but to grow something that pulses outward is kind of watching sleepy thoughts undo. Corks come forth and games all day. Them jumps in bite and time, and fray.

So Strange

The Bath Of Time

Everyone I know who says you can't go back to the past lives there. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter. That means almost nothing, next to the depth of time. Your skin is flying off at just about the same speed that it grows back, until a little man with a bushy black mustache sneaks in your window, chuckles, and puts you to sleep. He takes off his hat and gloves before he goes to work. Goats bleat in the distance. No one feels the room go cold. No one listens for the snakes in the carpet. The blood in your throat tastes like rust. You wave and weakly wave goodbye goodbye. The soft skin on your hand moves through the air like an arc of water tossed from a bucket.

Mustache And Crown

Marshes Under Mannahatta

Secretly, like fire. Apartments touch a bang touch in nineteen something nine. All shining wood grain is covered with rusted hasps and squares. Names in the ceiling own their leaving faces. Antic ghosts stay lonely in your dream each night, until you make a sea to drown. They are satisfied and leap and gulp air with anti-joy, sleeping for collision. Frantic cities gather your ocean, building sky arms and tangling your lungs. Everything that was above is under. Surprised faces glint in little mirrors falling from pockets and purses. People see that they themselves are mere image. Saws and hands warble, nothing. Nothing when you look at the time. Nothing when the bridges are lit with sailors’ fire.

Uniform Din Horizon Murk Unending Absence Equation For Planets And Medicine Illness Of Water And Loss

My dirty dog dark I need water I need stark I need my cold head full this letter for lusting and freezing new rain for seeing and this open window a raw gaunt shield of bracken body for taking down flumes of old hell and torn baggies of light and chambers of brushing sublimated trains aghast with wormflies hastening and broadening to fill yon voided bed oh mimics with candy oh breach of imperfect trust and secret world sans atom or atmosphere collude with igneous houses gathered in emptiness I flank and cranes wreck the gone bib and yellow dress relays quiet moats forward of winter bastions earthy black ponds of bursting metonymy.

Some Morning

It’s this leaky boat, these hundred horses in my herd, this bag of corpse knuckles. They keep taking me up and down the line and the ocean writes Thursday. The trade is the grown message infects everything. I am supposed to produce children now, with vigor, and instead only stanzas say. Strophes with faces and lasting hand impressions like my hands she once adored and held. I have broken bones on myself and on boards, karate boards, in early articulations of cracking up. Red morning sky and that red hair and haunting glance all briefly see and look away. I am at my sink thinking of my happiness.

of nothing

god of nothing I made me petals something I made me perhaps the trill of a thrush day made me saying lilt and up wayward town the men in me go genuflecting everything is toward her teeth everything bursting from clocks banging on sheets on metal and crying for pinkish gauzy ghosts that bring summer into crooked coldish places the heart in me the hearts the bratty arcing headlong dash at long legs laughter people staggering out of cars city ceilings buckling under moss dangling ringlets and noses in ears nor do I worry nor do I rush this thought is slow in rising that is fine that is this longish moment

The Thinnest Thread

Burnt and burning and the return of hows that heap the fire. Yellow leaves do the candle thing. This is not that. This is not the papier-mâché world we clotted up and rolled, our arms dirty and sand in cracks. This heaven thing: memory of a blue song in the hollow of an attic guitar. You play for me, I gather my belongings, sit and listen. The world is all alive with little Shinto creatures, humming in corners, everywhere softing. I have tea, we look at the designs on your arm, the meat is served and it is all very grand. The thinnest thread is all I need from thee, muse.

Seven Words Have Done It

The storms have thrashed these houses, these streets. It is winter and yet feels like flowers from what we say. The snow is in my head already. But your words are deciding things. We have said sleep and lying down and other things like how the world might go. The passage over mountains has made things. We have turned and seen each other looking. I like that you look for me, and I like to look for you. I taste orange in my mouth after a wish. It does the opposite of sting. We might look at the numbers on my door as we walk out. Stucco grey cloud heads roll in to see our earth arms. It will keep happening, this hat of desire. It will happen and keep relocating in our limbs, the tapes, laughter between us. Not the ones that got away but the ones that got to go, we’ll find far and foreign flavors and bring them back. As the dust that fills the world makes it old and new and clay each day, so will I make you new.

Marcella Riordan does Molly Bloom's closing soliloquy

...God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows or the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and 0 that awful deepdown torrent 0 and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (Excerpt from episode 18 of Ulysses by James Joyce)

Dream

Fish

The Ones With Arms And Legs

Fly And Snail

A Sort Of Reunion

This monkey morning haze, underneath the pepper man, keeps our restless eyes rolling. All the soda got drank up. I did it, I admit it, I’m a child in this story. Hooray. Watch the way I stand on my head and call out to people who make crow sounds. They rock the sun look, get tan, get Zen, say sure. I’ll strum this here, I had one more night with you, before we ever met. Nothing was total, or awesome. We went fast, the desert made us handsome and pretty. When I went back to your town, I was taller than most and stared at. I liked it for a while, as the monkey man. All your religion fell away and you looked relieved, while I pulled your hair. You held my hand and sang a little tinderbox. I needed help quitting everything.

Wearing The Same Hat

All these tanks, thinking longer about less and less, it’s how we get to our shows. Then it’s harder and it’s the way out, you live it without being home. You don’t think it but I do, as I live in windows. We talk, we birds, tattered and loving, but each day fries us with too many choices. I get my hand up and the days glance at it, measuring everything down. Even lights stop, briefly, the faster things get. This is a moment out of my life that no one will know completely, despite how I record it. Memory is merely a cut and paste job, but swampy. It’s good to be between the faraway and the close, even if it’s only possible. Down the line we’ll use honesty to make things, mistakes, and crack the glowsticks. I know we can if we shout softly to each other, in gracing breaths.

This House

Ink Blot Fluffy

This original drawing was done by the artist Nico Miller, currently of Paris, France. I did the photo effects. Thanks, Nico!

Time Travel Or Bust

Many thanks to the robotics engineer Cal Miller, currently of Paris, France, for the color inversion on this drawing!

Dancers Crouching, Before They Leap

Getting There.

Birthdays

Animals And Instruments

Without hard work the sad man gets nowhere. He needs music and now there is silence. The sad man buys food and watches movies and eats and has the worst dream in the world. He wakes up troubled because he dreamed he was trying to lock the doors and could not. He could not lock the doors and everyone kept coming in while he tried to work and think. They tried to name him Hugh, and Stan, and Hank, all these hefty, big-handed names, but he simply wanted them to leave or be quiet while he sat at his bench in the basement and made intricate things from wood. Animals and little houses and musical instruments out of little chunks of mahogany and pine that he would carve intricately and slowly when he could keep the people that called him Hank from always calling him Stan and always opening his door and talking on him. Soon he would move to a quiet part of town, where no one knew his name and he would pretend to be mean and nasty. There the only names people gave him were names like Victor or Dennis, and would leave him alone, he being unapproachable with such names. But he made better animals and instruments there, by far, and had much more intricate hands.

What You Have

Been a while for tumbling, been a while for old sleeping, been a feeling game, a dying in water bang, a lying in hands. You cannot do it, you save yourself again and again, but you cannot save you. You close your eyes for something and something goes away; it happens and it happens that it happens.  You’re built for this, built to stick the pin back in, built to draw the knife across the animal, built to be courageous and built to share a breath, perfectly built to see the sun and wander. Something round enters the field, a vagary, pinch of silt in the derelict river.

The oracular trees. The bursting. The shoes you took far into the forest on your growing feet. The elevating.

An x writes this, writes itself as a letter and seeks yet more variables. The seeking out of things, the fielding and the shaggy grammatical Huns. Gathering in circles, the forest sees you with your attitude shifting all the time: it knows your conscience, deems it silly. You don’t blush, in your souciance.

Go.  You have sore words. 

Bread

This is an arm. Hunger for memory and a mind for the road. The pushing and running gets tired and I need bread, and butter, and a couple of new feet. I show myself a sign I don’t understand and go down to the corner for bread. I eat bread at the window and bread looking over the bridge. The impossible depth and smell of the past kicks me. I eat bread to forget but I don’t feel filled. There’s milk, and apricots and coffee, but I just eat bread. The woody smell of it, like fresh nuts just cracked, hits my nose and I tear off another piece. I’m far into the middle of summer and the days getting shorter and bread keeps me familiar. I wake up when I’m not supposed to. I hear birds that sound like morning, only it’s not morning, it’s two hours after midnight. I reach out in the dark for more bread and thank the birds.

Perpetually Exploding And Renewing The Myth Of A Cosmic Center (en vert)